GranitePillar

Walk a mile in their shoes—writing user-focused online Help

by James Grayson

As a technical writer, one of the commonest complaints I hear is “this Help isn't helpful!” Writing online Help documentation is easy—writing good online Help documentation is something else again. However sophisticated, no website, service, or piece of software is better than your users' ability to understand it, and that makes good Help a powerful weapon in the war of winning and keeping customers. So, here are a few tips on how to plan Help content that will keep your users happy even when they run into problems.

Who are they and what do they know?

Who are your audience, and what is their expertise? The answer to that question will affect not only the voice and tone of your writing, but the level and detail of the content that you include. If your product's users are baby beginners, they'll likely need a lot more hand-holding than a more experienced audience. It's no good giving an audience of advanced web developers lengthy instructions on how to use the mouse, any more than it is expecting an audience of ten year-olds to get down and dirty editing registry keys.

Does it hurt when I do this? How about now?

Once you know who your audience is, the next task is to determine what it is that they need help with. Probably you'll already have a list of the different user tasks for your product, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that every task needs to have Help. In any Help system, you can usually bet that about 80% of the users' problems will be solved by about 20% of the content. The key is in identifying the important pain points, without drowning the user in a sea of other content that they're never likely to need.

Use any data that you can get your hands on—focus groups, usability studies, anything where real people have used the product and given feedback on where they had trouble. And when you've done that, use the product yourself, and take note of which tasks you complete easily, and which are more difficult. And remember that your objective is to make the product usable for its target audience, not for yourself. Just because you can do it doesn't necessarily mean that your target audience can. So, all the time ask yourself “if I was a member of my target audience, would I have had trouble with that task?” In this way you can compile a list of the major tasks that users are likely to encounter problems with most frequently, and that will become your initial list of topics.

Keep it simple, stupid

There are a great many style resources advising how best to actually write, tone, and phrase Help content, but there are two overarching rules that I personally think are the most important to follow at a topic and project level.

Simplicity and consistency

In any audience, there'll always be a range of reading literacy, so by keeping your sentence structure simple and your wording consistent, you'll greatly increase overall understanding. As a writer, it can be terribly frustrating to use the same phrasing over and over again, but familiar format and phraseology can make finding answers quicker and easier, and add a whole bunch of percentage points to user satisfaction.

How not what—keep it procedural

In practice, users rarely want to hear about exactly how the nuts and bolts of the product work. Most users don't go to Help for an education—they go there because they have a specific problem to solve or task to complete, and they want an answer. A good rule of thumb is that you should try to keep to a ratio of 20% conceptual information to 80% procedural information.

Like all writing, creating Help is as much an art as it is a science—there's no simple formula or template that will give you a universally effective solution. But if at every stage—planning, writing, publishing, and beyond—you keep your focus on the audience who will be using the product, and what their issues and needs are, you'll go a long way towards providing that rarest of beasts: the Help system that's actually helpful.

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